Dan Slater > Quotes

“In 2011, Mark Brooks, a consultant to online-dating companies, published the results of an industry survey titled “How Has Internet Dating Changed Society?” The survey responses, from 39 executives, produced the following conclusions:

“Internet dating has made people more disposable.”

“Internet dating may be partly responsible for a rise in the divorce rates.”

“Low quality, unhappy and unsatisfying marriages are being destroyed as people drift to Internet dating sites.”

“The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.”

“Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”

From "A Million First Dates
How online romance is threatening monogamy" in January/February 2013”
― Dan Slater, A Million First Dates: Solving the Puzzle of Online Dating

“By 2000, six years after NAFTA was implemented, trade between Mexico and the United States had tripled, to $247 billion, and the four bridges that connected Nuevo Laredo to Laredo saw 60,000 trucks go north per week.”
― Dan Slater, Wolf Boys: Two American Teenagers and Mexico's Most Dangerous Drug Cartel

“The future,” says Dan Winchester, “will see better relationships but more divorce. The older you get as a man, the more experienced you get. You know what to do with women, how to treat them and talk to them. I often wonder whether matching you up with great people is getting so efficient, and the process so enjoyable, that marriage will become obsolete.”
― Dan Slater, Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating

“When leading politicians have gotten sacked in more disordered political systems such as Thailand and the Philippines, they have typically enjoyed alternative routes to the political summit. Where power is not ordered, there is no political wilderness.”
― Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia

“Beneath all of that grandeur, on the other hand, there was rot. If New York had the grandest mansions, it also had the worst slums, inhabited by a massive underclass who worked in the city’s thirty thousand factories.”
― Dan Slater, The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld

“Gaynor disliked reformers. The ones he knew were hypocrites who wanted to tell the poor when they could consume alcohol or conduct business. Too often, in Gaynor’s view, reformers were the same people who paid slave wages, then turned around and called East Siders prostitutes and criminals. “Such people think it is the mayor’s job to not have a single criminal on the streets,” Gaynor once wrote. “I ask these good people what they have done to rescue a single unfortunate woman from the life she is leading.” But if Gaynor had to deal”
― Dan Slater, The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld

“During the peak decades of globalized Jewish prostitution, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, whenever morality crusades would seek to push Jewish pimps out of a city, the crusade’s success often coincided with a kind of Spartacus moment, an episode in which a prostitute, or a group of prostitutes, decided to break the chain of bondage and join the crusade.”
― Dan Slater, The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld

“Second-order information, writes communications professor Ilana Gershon, is the meaning of a message beyond its explicit terms, “the information that can guide you into understanding how particular words and statements should be interpreted.” Linguistic anthropologists refer to this as metapragmatics.”
― Dan Slater, Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating